


through that transparent air

by seaer



Series: magnus library [3]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Literary Allusions, M/M, POV first person direct address, canon-typical leitners, gerry voice: really great of herman melville to write a whole book based on the mastodon album, narration that makes you say Damn this bitch really was raised in a bookstore, once again. memory as nuisance/memory as torment, sixth form actually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:35:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29510487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seaer/pseuds/seaer
Summary: My brain was cartwheeling in my skull. Thoughts stormed. Things likeWhat if my ankle snaps?, andOver Descartian vortices I hover, and, looking at you below,Leap of faith. Keays have never been religious. All the way up to the Von Closens we’ve been heathens. But right then, just in that moment, looking down at your pointed face tiny because of the distance between us, I had something I wanted to martyr myself for.Or: Keay and Crew (the two-headed lower sixth hydra) and approximately ten thousand other, less human monsters.
Relationships: Michael "Mike" Crew/Gerard Keay
Series: magnus library [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2070711
Comments: 13
Kudos: 21





	through that transparent air

**Author's Note:**

> sorry in advance! it’s six k of pure self indulgence. here there be monsters and a frankly stupendous amount of teen codependency
> 
> part of magnus library, references events in rooms full of people who do not love each other yet. in an ideal world you’d read this AFTER i’m done with this ponderous keaycrew mini-epic but i finished this and i’m posting it!!!!!! patience is my enemy. have a pre-game
> 
> title from moby-dick ch 35 the mast-head also known as the Vast bible in a novel already sort of dedicated to the Vast

_Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog—Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse._  
The Whiteness of the Whale — Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

 _You remember too much,  
my mother said to me recently.  
Why hold onto all that? And I said,  
Where can I put it down?_  
The Glass Essay, Anne Carson

* * *

Science records the number of people with highly accurate autobiographical memory at about sixty. They call it hyperthymesia. Overmemory. The past in excess. It’s strange because people who have it aren’t exceptional when it comes to remembering anything else, like number combinations flashed on a screen, or passages of an extract. It’s not a broadly superior memory; it’s an archive in overdrive, your personal history pouring into a sink with the drain plugged shut, and it is not about to help you ace that test.

But I’ve never turned to science out of everything when I needed something laid plain, so I prefer not to think of myself alongside that chosen sixty, and I’m definitely not going to be signing my brain up for dissection anytime soon. Anyway I might argue that what I have is a broadly superior memory—it’s everything. It doesn’t go into any box easily. All the more reason not to offer myself up to research.

(Dissection was more your thing. You liked to know your injuries empirically. You subscribed to meteorology magazines; you used that Russian website you had to hack open peer-reviewed scientific journals about the weather. I prayed to the Eye to be kind when it wielded me and never bothered with the neuroscience.)

Lately this memory’s been on my horizon more than any other. This is how it is—they come and go like clouds (that simile’s for you, dearest). If I had to bet money, I’d say there’s no way you remember it. Though you’ll claim that you remember. You have this thing where you say you remember stuff that you don’t recall in the slightest, and then dodge my quiz questions while trying to pass it off as indifference. I don’t understand why you do that, if you’re teasing or if you think you can fool me. You can’t fool me, by the way. It’s all in the eyes. You might make that polite _Yeah, yeah, yeah_ face, but every time you act like you remember something you don’t I can see the pure nothing spinning behind those 3a.m. airplane-window peepers. No memories, hippocampus clean as the day you were born.

I’ve always wondered what your threshold is, where sits the event horizon beyond which all your memories suck themselves into a storm-cloud vortex, never to be spat back out again, because in sixth form you were wicked at studying, at absorbing those complex chemical reactions and reproducing them, but on the other hand you’d stand me up for lunch because the date and time had slipped into your little black-hole brain and disappeared. I waited outside that Italian place for you for nearly an hour that one time, so many old people glaring at me, the leather on my jacket melting off, the steel caps on my boots enough to scald you if you touched them. I’m joking. I barely felt the heat. I’m hotter than a London summer by far.

So I would bet a hundred solid pounds sterling that you don’t remember the title of that book we found. Maybe even two hundred, it was pretty generic, and I might’ve forgotten it by now too if I wasn’t me. It was _The Eighth_. No author. It was a new-looking paperback, white and black mostly, and it wasn’t from the Leitner collection. Ring any bells? The title was a tasteful serif. You said, _Boring_ , because it didn’t have blood on its pages and it wasn’t some meteorologist’s wet dream.

Do you remember what it did? I’ll tell it to you if you don’t. I remember everything.

We found it where we found most of our playthings back then: the Magnus library. You were perusing books with glossy pictures of cumulonimbi, about seven of them at once, and I was looking for anything in any language that had died and gone to hell (hell being language classes for snobbish linguists). On the contrary, I noticed _The Eighth_ because it was the only book among its neighbours to not have pages the colour of coffee. It was in English.

“Crew,” I said. “Come take a gander.”

You put aside your Weather 101s and stood to join me at the bookshelf. “What is it?” you asked. I didn’t have an answer for you. Just then that library club jock Stoker with the nice face pushed the book cart into the aisle we were in, saw the mess you had made, and wheeled it back out. You didn’t notice because you’d started reading the first page. You didn’t like to look before you leaped.

“Be careful,” I told you, uselessly.

“It’s fine,” you said. “I’ll tell you if I start to feel like howling at the moon.” You flipped on, through heavy white pages. It was then that you said, “Boring.”

“Then give it back,” I said.

“I’d like to read it still,” you said. “You can have it back when I’m done.” This was our arrangement for most books, because you didn’t often read for keepsies, and I brought the books that didn’t meet your secret criteria (all of them) to Pinhole to cash in. Your eyes moved to the side and down like you were holding this one up to the light to see if it was what you were looking for.

“What is it?” I echoed your first question back at you.

You knew Smirke’s, I’d taught it to you, but you didn’t swear by it. Eyes still on the book, you said, “Some sort of memoir. Compendium. Whatever.”

“About what?” You had not answered the question I’d meant to ask.

Reading off a page, you said, “Beasts most curious and dreadful.”

Everchase, maybe. I still hated that one. Or a combination manual. I recalled your quip about howling at the moon and grew suddenly concerned. “You shouldn’t read it when you’re on your own.”

You did that thing that you liked to do sometimes where you’d repeat what I’d said, but higher. I told you to do something that started with _F_ and ended with _uck off_. It was all very touching and juvenile. The real Year 12 stuff.

“Go ahead and accidentally feed yourself to a monster, then,” I said. “I’ll give your eulogy, except it won’t be a eulogy because it’s going to go, Mike Crew got eaten by a werewolf and it was so his fault.” I grasped for the antonymic prefix. “A dyslogy.”

“Sounds excellent,” you said. You closed the book and went back to pick up all the others you’d left on the floor. “Make sure you get all the innuendos about being eaten in there.”

The whole rest of the day you lounged on a library couch, making steady progress through the book, and I wandered around bothering you and Jon Sims in turn. I’d lost you to the pages already, though, and you declined to humour me, fixated as you were on the words inside. If it was any other person I would have been panicking, but I knew what you were like when you held a book. You had this laser focus. Sometimes when I said things you wouldn’t hear me, then you would look up whole minutes later with uncertainty on your face and ask, _Did you say something?_ I thought it was a gag the first time you did it. But, like I always say, it’s all in the eyes. You really didn’t hear anything else when you read. I saw the entirety of your concentration in the slight dip of your eyelids and the hungry gleam you got in them when you thought you were getting close to something. My hands tied figuratively by your focus, I dropped myself into the couch beside you and took a nap.

For all your imitations, you passed me the book before you went home on that first day and every day after. For all my reservations, I didn’t follow my own advice. I cracked it open on the same night, in my mum’s study in Pinhole. She was away on a three-day business trip in Antwerp that I’d sweet-talked my way out of, so I dripped bathwater onto her floorboards and sat in her saffron armchair and tried the book that had taken your fancy. It was as you said—a compendium. One bloke’s detailing of every improper creature he’d had the misfortune of meeting, of which there were eight. Predictably. I was usually wary about these things, but you, my inadvertent lab rat, had seemed fine reading it, so I gave it a shot. Maybe we could get together the next day and have a quaint little book club thought swap.

The newish facade of the book turned out to conceal the most intolerably ornate diarist (I say this with full self-awareness). I made it through the first and the second parts and called it quits after the man in the third began to sprout hair most coarse and lupine. It wasn’t all wolf-men, though. Credit where credit’s due. You got custody in the day, I read it by night. We did not have any quaint little book club thought swaps.

About four days after, you were already near the end. We were at the cafeteria after school at the table we always sat at, me wincing down a mug of very bad coffee at four in the afternoon, you eating through the last chapters of the book. I knocked back the awful dregs. You turned the last printed page and put the spine of the book down on the green surface of the table.

“I think we might have to start running,” you said, not at all alarmingly.

“I beg your pardon?” I asked.

You stood. “I’m sorry,” you said, which alarmed me more than anything else you could have chosen to say. “I can explain on the way. Come on.” Then, because I was not moving for the sheer madness of it, you grabbed my wrist and put all your insubstantial two-meals-a-day mass to motion and pulled me after you. I rose to my feet to help you out.

We ran together down the length of the cafeteria, normies staring at us the whole time. You in your faux neck brace and me in my shitty rendition of Magnus tidiness, school shirt half-out. Your hand was like a cuff made of breeze. I took my wrist free easily. You were fast, or at least faster than me, who got technicolour swirls in my vision when I stood up too quickly, and we tore out of the cafeteria and into the antechamber with the past headmasters on the walls. You wouldn’t have brought me if I wasn't in danger, I reasoned from past experience, memories of you bearing your own crosses coming to mind, so I kept my mouth shut and ran.

“How far have you read until?” you demanded over your shoulder. The neck brace made this difficult.

“Fifth,” I shouted back. “I skipped the third.”

“Why?” You’d forfeited looking forward while you ran to interrogate me. If the halls hadn’t been virtually deserted in the afternoon lull you would’ve wiped the fuck out on some poor innocent child and broken all the bones in your body.

I was trying to scrounge together my thesis against the Hunt when something ahead caught my eye. “Watch out!”

Your head snapped back forward at a speed that was very suspicious for someone wearing a brace on his neck. The speed was vital. You stopped in time; the first beast missed you when it shot breadthwise across the corridor and onto the wall. I ran up into your back, gaping openly.

Number one was taut and terrible and put together wrong, if ever a creature of its variety could be put together right. It was the colour of nuclear winter, and something sharp flicked periodically around what might have been its hind legs. The book had called it many things: harbinger, herald, dread animal. I thought it should be called what it was: sick as fuck.

You didn’t give it time to volley another attack. You didn’t even really look at it. You took off again, down the corridor, circumventing the panther-like manifestation that crouched growling under a noticeboard. I kept close behind. The first’s barbed-wired mouth flirted with my ankles; it unfurled itself in a snap and threw its mass against the back of my legs. I tripped to the ground, swearing, but adrenaline made the way back to my feet easy. I ran after you. You didn’t wait for me. You were used to running without a ball-and-chain, and you hadn’t even noticed. The first’s steel-footed pursuit skittered after us, more slight than its form had suggested.

“Hey, am I catastrophising,” I started when I’d caught up to you, rambling, out of breath, “or can I assume that every monster in that stupid book you’re holding is after us?”

You didn’t answer right away. You hurtled up a staircase, I followed. You said, all fake-blasé like you always tried to be, “The latter.”

We rounded the landing and came face-to-face with the second. As a running theme, it was pallid and horrible, much like the previous monster (and also kind of like myself—seventeen, haggard, gleefully anemic). All the whooping imps of the Blocksburg couldn’t compare. It had more limbs than the both of us combined, and though it didn’t move, a coiled, ropy arm begin to unspool, white fingers reaching outward for you.

We one-eightied at the speed of light. Number one had reached the foot of the stair, and without so much as looking it in its milky eye you took advantage of your higher ground on the staircase and hurled yourself over it. Caught between the devil and the standing broad jump I’d never been very good at in gym class, I tried the broad jump and came up with a passing grade.

You led me sprinting to the lobby, the new one with the lift and the ornamental plants, and jammed the button for up. We stood there like twits for way too long, breathing hard, waiting for the elevator, me either hallucinating the sound of monster number one gaining on us or hearing it for real. Lazily, the lift doors slid open, and we flung ourselves inside, our reflections wide-eyed in the four-walled mirror. As the doors closed I saw the white form of the first round a corner and grow closer; then they shut all the way and I could pretend we were safe.

Flipping through the culprit book, you said, “Okay. _Fuck_. I don’t suppose you have a lighter on you right now.”

My death’s head Zippo was zipped into the inside pocket of my favourite jacket, and I’d left my jacket at Pinhole. I told you as much. Sorry, but one doesn’t tend to assume you need to commit arson on a daily basis.

Apparently you did. “Mine’s in my bag. In class.”

“And class is on the other side of this god-damned Leviathan campus,” I cried at the ceiling of the elevator.

“No big deal,” you said. A child could have seen through you. You eyed the button for the fifth floor, lit up in white, then the panel that showed the lift’s progress. “To the fifth. Then through the secondary block. Then—”

“ _Yes_ big deal!” I said. “You can’t get to the sixth form side via the fifth floor. You need the link bridge on the first.” I reached to press the first and realised that the lift had passed it long ago. “God. Good God. Okay, we can take the stairs down.” The lift doors opened. The both of us, in an unspoken agreement that neither of us wanted to stay in that lift for a second longer, rocketed out into fifth-floor sunshine. It was only luck that no snarling creature lay in waiting.

The snarling creature had the courtesy to appear on the way to the staircase. The third, as you know, was my least favourite. The hair on number three was coarse and snow-coloured, its eyes luminous. It dropped from above, which was baffling, because the ceiling did not have rafters. Something flashed across your face like you saw how curved and rangy the thing was and thought that maybe you could knock it over, or something, and run past. It was my turn to grab your wrist. I dragged you back to run in the other direction; you followed, but shot me a caustic look even as you did.

“Crew, man, this isn’t D&D Five-E,” I hissed. Behind us the third thing broke into a baleful howl. “You can’t—you can’t—”

You said, rather bitchily, “We need the spiral staircase if we want to use the link bridge.”

“We’ll take the other staircase down and take the spiral from the fourth floor.” It was getting hard to talk. “That thing—that thing’s not worth the fast lane.”

“Are you scared?” you asked, which I should have punched you for. “Don’t worry. I’m here.” You fit so much honesty into your sarcasm that I wasn’t sure if you were being genuine. Maybe you were. With that inspiring declaration you removed your wrist from my grip and sped ahead. I cast a look backwards at our pursuer; it was gaining at an alarming pace.

The next couple of chapters in the book passed in a riot of teeth and no colour at all. We were on the run from the third and the addition of the fourth when a teacher passed us on our way to the spiral staircase. He was the first other person we’d encountered. As we hurtled by, things that weren’t wolves at our heels, he said, quite amiably, “Michael, son, don’t run in the hallways, you might get hurt!” to which you replied, “Yessir!” even as you sprinted on. He made no comment about our procession of monsters, which was bloody fucking typical. Our procession of monsters made no comment on him. Eyes on the prize seemed to be the philosophy of the day. “Halfway through,” you told me over your shoulder. I rewarded you with a theatrical groan.

We made progress, we backtracked, we went up again and then down, harassed by beasts like the house of Atreus hounded by Furies. Crew, it was the hardest exercise I’d had in years. I don’t think my ACL was ever the same after. The fifth appeared just when we were almost to the first floor, and we had to run all the way back up to get away from it. The first reappeared, you kicked it hard in the head, it spat three wire-sharp teeth at your feet. So on.

We made it to the link bridge eventually and for a moment it seemed like we’d lost the more fervent chasers. You ran through, between the columns of the connecting colonnade, to the sixth form block. As we passed back into the shade I felt a familiar, peculiar tingle behind the sockets of my eyes. A static warning. Before we could turn the corner into the portion of the floor that led toward the staircase, I grabbed you, my intuition incandescent, and pulled you into a niche where we stood pressed with our backs up against a picture of Jonah Magnus. There were way too many pictures of Jonah Magnus in that school.

My panic must have shown on my face, because you had no jibes or demands for me. Very often the conditions of your trust eluded my understanding. You only looked at me, chest rising and falling fast, questions crowding in the furrows on your brow, your eyes full of that imperceptible, fierce faith. The certainty of it disconcerted me badly. I wished then that I’d never seen it, that I could have had the peace of looking into your eyes and not noticing. Your trust was the holiest burden I’d ever had to carry.

Your unasked questions answered themselves. From down the corridor, its progenitor unseen, a voice came floating over. We froze in tandem; it was mine. “Creeeew,” it sang, in a coyer tone than one I’d ever employed. Ever heard your voice on a recording, warped and overall awful to listen to? This was the same, just infinitely worse. The disgust on your face was palpable. I imagine the disgust on mine was, as well.

“Weird,” you whispered through your revulsion. “I’d thought it would be me.”

“Get over yourself,” I said. This, I counted off in my head, was the sixth, the one I hadn’t yet gotten familiar with. If it was using my voice, it was a dead ringer for the Stranger.

The voice came again. It’d shed the coquettish lilt (thankfully) for something no less horrifying. “Michael,” it tried, and its voice was multiplied, a dozen of me all talking over each other, calling for you. Gerry Legion. It sounded like it was closer, just around the corner, maybe. I felt a nasty chill sweep up my skin. You gripped my hand where I’d left it, on your arm. I laced my hand into yours and gripped back. Your fingernails cut sharp moons into the back of my hand. I was holding so hard I could feel my own making imprints on yours, too. I think now that this alone was an apt enough representation of us: needing each other so keenly that it stung.

“Crew,” said the fake Gerry one last time, and its rice-paper face appeared from behind the corner. It was me, bleached to a flimsy eidolon pallor. To this day I remember it to the finest detail. The scars scored on its temple were stark white. Everything about it was colourless but for the eyes: black as bitumen, like a drawing, its eyelids translucent and shot with dark veins. It was wearing what I was wearing, down to the school shirt half-in and half-out and the stylised eye I’d penned on my knee through the slit in my slacks. It said again, “Michael Crew.”

“Oh, _ew,_ ” I wailed with a distress I doubt I will ever again feel as strongly as I did in that moment.

“Oh, ew,” it mimicked in that perfect, fucked-up Keay cadence. And you. You released my hand, reared your weight back, and threw it forward again to hit fake-me straight in the face.

You, national hero. You, Britain’s bloody finest. You did it with the enthusiasm of someone who’d been dreaming of punching me in the face all your life. You did it with the enthusiasm of someone who was determined to prove to me that this was, in fact, D&D Fifth Edition, and that you’d fight whatever monster you saw fit. The sixth gave a flutelike squeal that definitely did not sound like me, and it shuddered backwards into Keay ruin: its form split open like a white lotus, more faces sprung outward like Gerard Keay themed pop-up ads. It sheathed itself, and we didn’t wait for it to recover; you ran. I ran after you, the widest idiot grin on my face.

As you ran, you muttered to yourself, like a chant, “Almost, almost, almost, almost, almost.” I suppose you were right. All we had to do was take the far staircase up to our classroom, break out the lighter fluid, and set the book on fire. Predictably, it was not that easy.

We ran down the wing, past empty classrooms. That part was unenclosed, afternoon sunlight lounging leisurely, at odds with our predicament. Behind us number sixth slung words at us in my voice. It put together nonsense sentences just to remind us it was on our tail and inhuman as ever.

We neared the staircase at the end of the wing. That part of the first floor overlooked the olive-grass quadrangle on the ground floor below. The staircase was plain, un-spiraled, and we’d climbed up it hundreds of times before, on our way back to class.

You stepped up one stone stair and stopped. I didn’t have to pull you back; you’d heard. From further up the stairs: heavy thumps with a weight to them that couldn’t be human, a large creature descending. You put your hand on the banister and wheeled yourself around to take our only escape route, down the stairs, instead.

More alarm signals went off in my head. You stopped short again. From lower on the stairs, the seventh ascended, many things at once: white, foul, disastrous. The only thing it wasn’t was fast. It was made up, it seemed, of many pale worms, assembled in the shifting, sloughing shape of a man, broad enough to take up the breadth of the stairwell.

Up wasn’t possible. Down was disgusting. Back was blocked by the worst of our enemies: me. We were caught. The smart thing to do was to take our chances with Not-Gerry, slight as it was, and hope its skin stayed on long enough for us to get by it without it peeling off to reveal, I don’t know, six hundred chainsaws. It was a fact that you were smart. It was also a fact that you were nonetheless never good at doing the smart thing.

The next few seconds happened very quickly. You took several steps back, bumping up against me, you glanced over your shoulder at me or the evil me, I wasn’t certain. I had a moment of your face. The shine to your eyes. The faint white of scar tissue on your cheek. Then you turned away and launched yourself forward to the very edge of the wing, stepped up onto the parapet, and jumped off.

It was a leap to end all leaps. Thin air held you tenderly, like a lover, and for moment I thought you might stay there forever, held in place like a marble statue on a string. A five-foot archangel. Then came the drop—you made falling look as graceful as ballet, made downwards look like a stage direction. A split second and you were out of sight. My mouth was open for so long it was a miracle nothing unseemly flew in. Sometimes total recall grants me blessings, memories like this, things I can press play on in the middle of the night in bed and watch over and over again. Congrats. You’re a movie star, if only for my midnight cinema. Top ten Michael Crew sixth form moments.

I had very little time to make my own decision. Not-Gerry was gaining, number seven had reached the first floor, and very quickly it was beginning to look like a matter of jump or be jumped. Either way my fate would catch up to me right there at the balustrade, so I decided to make its job easier and get to the edge to receive it. I leaned over it and saw you on the quad below, unhurt from the trip down, already standing, already looking up at me. God, Mike. Every saint was on your side that day.

As for me? My brain was cartwheeling in my skull. Thoughts stormed. Things like _What if my ankle snaps?_ , and _Over Descartian vortices I hover_ , and, looking at you below, _Leap of faith_. Keays have never been religious. All the way up to the Von Closens we’ve been heathens. But right then, just in that moment, looking down at your pointed face tiny because of the distance between us, I had something I wanted to martyr myself for.

I put my foot onto the parapet and threw myself after you. The space between wing and quadrangle felt less like first-floor drop and more like motherfucking forever. My mother had never been the kind of mother to deliver me hypotheticals along the lines of, if all your friends jumped off a building would you follow them? but if she ever had my answer would clearly have been hell yes. The ground hit me, grassy and horribly horizontal, but I’d landed reasonably well and nothing shattered upon impact. That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. I struggled to get to my feet, the world orbiting around me.

And raised my head. You hadn’t run off in the meantime. I caught your eye as I was halfway-standing, knee to the ground, below you like I never usually was. You had the oddest look on your face. I don’t think I’d ever seen it before, and I’d seen plenty of your expressions, tricky to discern between as they were. I’d gotten good at the discerning. But this one—this one was new. The smile was small, fearsome, and it lifted your eyes—Michael, were you _proud?_

You didn’t stay long enough for me to be sure. You didn’t pop a catchy one-liner or say anything tacky like _Atta-boy!_ which was a pity because I do love catchy one-liners. You turned, swapped the book between your hands, and said loud enough to the air in front of you that I could hear, “Eighth.”

I wheeled my head around so fast I think I got whiplash on top of my whiplash, but I didn’t see anything. The quad was empty; no one had seen the frankly impressive stunt we’d just pulled, and all the monsters seemed, by a stroke of luck, to be elsewhere. I weighed permutations in my impact-addled mind. “Next best route is through the library and up the staircase out front?”

You nodded; I staggered fully to my feet. At any moment I expected the Not-Gerry or the worm seventh to burst out of the staircase onto the ground floor, but we lurched back into a weary run and they fell away, far enough behind that we could forget they still pursued. We ducked out of the quadrangle through the archway and tracked our trajectory towards the back entrance. In those years, all roads led back to the Magnus library. When we went up to sixth form we were there nearly all our days; it was a minute’s trip from our class, down the stairs, through the quad, in through the back door. We didn’t often take the other staircase because Michael Shelley liked to sit in it, and you and him together were a recipe for fistfight. I remember one time when I dropped by to get you from band practice so we could go home together, you had these nasty cherry-pink scratches right across your face; he had tissue paper jammed up his nose, bled red. I told you on the way home that you and I matched. I don’t know why, but it seemed to make you more upset.

I still wonder what it was he said to you. How he got you that angry, and if I could do the same if I tried. You’d never fought _me_ like that.

We turned into the lane where the back entrance was. Beside the fig plant that Jonathan Sims’ bicycle was always chained to was the eighth, which was bloody God damned fucking typical of things. Always that slope. Always the same monsters. Always the two of us, getting whaled on together. We got whaled on so often you could’ve put a mast on us and called us the Pequod.

The eighth was a planet’s worth of light, a walking funeral pyre. Deliciously Nabokovian, by which I mean, of course, that it was pale fire. Too wide across and too high up to be a man. It radiated liquid heat hot enough to be felt from where we stood, struck still, its eyes at once coal-dark and white-hot, the dozens of them spinning, blinking. Saturn’s rings in mini.

I knew what you were thinking in that moment. You might scoff, but the Beholding didn’t love me for nothing. And I was there for the last time this had happened: in the rain, your Lichtenberg creature flickering in the exact same spot number eight was standing in. If it were raining then, we might’ve had less problems, or, on second thought, as the gears clicked into place in my head, more problems.

“Crew!” I said. You’d stepped several paces back already. “Give me the book.” As you moved back, the eighth advanced, slowly, surely. It wasn’t a walk; it was more of a glide, flames licking its heels.

Here the conditions of your trust eluded me again. You hesitated. You had a habit of holding on to your volumes for dear life, like something in them was your salvation, raring to slip out of your grasp if you loosened your grip for just a second. You’d sleep with books under your duvet with you, I discovered one of the times you had me over at your place, before it sank. Kept them as close as knives.

So it took you about three and a half seconds to come to a decision. I was about to tell you what to do with it so you could do it yourself when you shoved the thin white paperback at me. Just three point five seconds! Touching. Seriously.

I grabbed the book. Simple problems, I reasoned, needed simple solutions. I drew my master hand back like pulling a bow taut, the book gripped spine-wise in it my quarrel, and flung _the Eighth_ authorless into the flames of its titular beast.

There was a moment I thought I’d misjudged, that the book wouldn’t burn in its brethren’s blaze and I’d damned the both of us. But fire was fire. The moment of nothing burned up. Heat exploded outwards in a supernova, the force rippling so deceptively daintily over us that I only realised it had blown us over seconds later, when I was on the ground, blinking at a white sky. My ears were ringing cheerfully. I propped myself up on an elbow and saw the empty stretch of back lane, some of the grass on the rise still burning with that unearthly flame, and you, crumpled some distance away, looking impossibly small. No monster, as far as I could tell.

You stirred; I flopped back down, appeased. I was still short of breath. I figured there was no need to stand up if I hadn’t anything to do, so I lay prone on the rough concrete, palms skyward by my side as if in supplication. It took you maybe a minute to crawl close enough that I noticed.

“Don’t know how I didn’t think of that,” you said from beside me, like the wee cunt you were, taking an axe to my glory. You’d stripped off the neck brace in the heat, and popped your collar up to hide the majority of your branching scar.

“Must be the worms in your brain,” I said. You gave a low sound like you agreed.

“It was smart,” you conceded, the equivalent of handing me a piece of the glory you’d just taken an axe to. High praise from you, Michael seventeen-and-reticent Crew.

“Thanks,” I said. “See. This is why you need to bring me along whenever you’re running from assorted monsters. No more _Stay here and you’ll be safe_. I’m compulsory.”

“Fine,” you said, and managed to sound like you meant it. Then you followed it up with, “Every celebrity needs arm candy.”

Which I tried my best not to laugh at and failed. It was a nice mental image. Me and you on the red carpet, playacting civility. “What would you be famous for? Band things? You know I’d be Salesa’s hot date first if it was band things.”

“Kai su, teknon?” you murmured, betrayed as you were. I cracked my eyes open just a little and let in two little slices of blinding light. Maybe I’d lied.

“Seriously,” I said, departing from the celebrity scenario to make sure you’d swear. “Even if you think it might get us both killed. Promise you won’t leave me behind?”

It was a step off from the dispassionate dealings classic to our acquaintance. Trust an ordeal to get us syrupy. Before I could regret asking, you said, “I won’t. I promise.”

Which, as you should now know, was also a stone-cold, bare-faced, underhanded lie. Maybe hell for the both of us was a room where we sat on opposite sides of a table and lied to each other nonstop. Maybe I wouldn’t have minded.

Because, Crew, I stand by this: lies from you would’ve been better than truth from anybody else. You could have lied me to dreamless, dewy sleep. Where I am now I don’t mind if you lied. I don’t care if you didn’t lie, but instead forgot that you promised, which, in hindsight, seems a lot more likely. At this point you can forget your promises. You can forget that the monsters ever happened to us, you can forget that you swore not to go without me, hell, Michael, you can forget my name and you can forget my face if you at least remember who I am. It’s all I ask.

Nobody agrees as to where you’ve gone. Oliver told me Harvard Medicine. Jon suggested England’s pole vault team. Tim Stoker says he heard you’re going to uni in West Sussex. I even asked Jude Perry, one night when I saw her smoking outside the pub with one whole girl per arm. She said, dead in a ditch hopefully, or Vietnam, which were two very different places. The point is that you’re elsewhere, and I only am trapped alone to tell this story.

Back then you weren’t anywhere but next to me. Clouds passed overhead, their shade falling over us in dream-blue gossamer. With detached proficiency you rolled onto your side and into mine. I pulled my arm out from under you and hovered it, hand up, but didn’t put it down around your shoulder. I remember the midday warmth of your body, the salt sweat at the concave of my neck. I remember every breath you breathed out at the side of my chest. We lay there until the clouds blew away, exhausted together. You below my arm, little liar, small and easy as leaving.

**Author's Note:**

> hey. if you have thoughts about them what a coincidence i do too. hands you my [business card](http://bdhead.tumblr.com)


End file.
